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With Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End just hours away from swallowing America's multiplexes like a tentacled leviathan, star Keira Knightley has emerged victorious in a legal battle against British tabloid The Daily Mail for having suggested her bony frame was providing unnecessary thinspiration for fanorexic teens. Reuters reports:

British actress Keira Knightley, star of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" film trilogy, won £3,000 ($5,965) in libel damages on Thursday over a newspaper slur that she was excessively thin. [...]

The Daily Mail had run a story with a picture of her in a bikini, headlined: "If Pictures Like This One of Keira Carried a Health Warning, My Darling Daughter Might Have Lived".

Smith told the judge, Justice David Eady, that Knightley accepted that she had undergone weight training for roles in action films and that this had involved muscle toning which did alter physical appearance.

While a $6000 ruling isn't much, this was nevertheless a major victory for Knightley on principal alone: Few could appreciate the physical and emotional demands involved in starring in an epic adventure trilogy like Pirates, whose exasperated actors, set adrift upon an endless sea of meaningless action sequences and confusing plot threads, have been clinically proven to burn twice as many calories per hour as their counterparts who have some clue as to what the hell is going on in their big summer popcorn movie.